When Women Lead

July 4, 2022
“Women’s strengths are... simply not associated with great leadership,” posits Boorstin, CNBC’s senior media and tech correspondent, in her debut, a thorough if tepid overview of women’s progress in the workplace. To replace common leadership stereotypes (such as “the imperious salt-and-pepper patriarch” and “the move-fast-and-break-things tech bro”), Boorstin interviewed 120 women “and some men” and found new prototypes. The classic belief that business leaders are “authoritative, unquestioning male leaders” isn’t all true—women have their own qualities “that correlate with great leadership,” such as being considerate, empathetic, and vulnerable, and being more likely to consider “social and environmental goals.” Boorstin’s interviewees come from a diverse set of industries: “the CEO of three fertility companies” is a case study in how “women are more likely than men to be proactive when it comes to their medical care,” while the head of a renewable energy business highlights that “men in their twenties and thirties report having much higher confidence in themselves than women of the same age do.” While the stories are upbeat and hopeful, the message that a “female” model of leadership can transform industries is an old one. In a crowded field, this one comes up short.

Starred review from July 1, 2022
An investigation of women leaders and how they "have been able to turn genuine grievance into entrepreneurial grit." Boorstin, the senior media and tech correspondent for CNBC and a former reporter for Fortune, is interested in the differences between companies founded by women and those established by men. The author examines more than 60 companies, and all of her interviewees encountered huge obstacles. Some of the most telling statistics relate to venture capital funding. "Female founders consistently draw less than 3 percent of all venture capital dollars," writes Boorstin, "and it is VC funding that enabled companies such as Facebook, Google, and Airbnb to spend years losing money while growing." Furthermore, "when female entrepreneurs do successfully raise venture funding, they generally raise less than half as much as their male counterparts." Many VC investors look for brash, hyperconfident optimism from CEOs seeking funding, and women founders tend to be more circumspect and cautious. However, Boorstin clearly shows that when women make it past the starting line, their companies often outperform the market. They intend their companies to become lasting enterprises, whereas men are more likely to dash for growth in order to cash in on the company via sale or initial public offering. Women are also more likely to work at building resilience and reserves into the company's architecture, a strategy that turned out to be crucial when the pandemic hit. They begin to build a reliable team very early in the company's life, often looking for a diversity of skills and opinions. Boorstin provides sufficient data showing the positive impact of diversity and argues convincingly that the best counter to bias is citing the profitability figures and performance evidence for women-led firms. Thankfully, many of the successful entrepreneurs in this book have set up mechanisms to support the next generation. Inspiring stories that provide critical insights into how women-founded companies begin, operate, and prosper.

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